1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to scanning and reporting on storage resources. More particularly, the present invention relates to scanning and reporting on storage resources in a UNIX or UNIX derivative operating system computing environment.
2. Background Information
In UNIX, LINUX and other UNIX derivative operating systems, information about storage resources, such as type, size, manufacturer, serial number, etc., is scattered across various utilities, configuration and kernel access files. Each of the sources for obtaining the information also typically has its own format and protocol.
For example, the size of a physical storage resource in a UNIX or UNIX derivative environment can typically be found in at least three ways: sending a query to the operating system using a system service such as “ioct1,” which will return the total number of blocks for the storage device; opening a special system file in the “/proc” directory tree and locating the storage device in the table; and sending a low-level query to the storage device itself, for example, issuing the SCSI command “READ_CAPACITY” or the ATA command “IDENTIFY.”
This seemingly haphazard design for the location and accessing of storage resource information creates a challenge for, and results in more complex, storage management software in such environments.
Thus, a need exists for a simpler way to access storage resource information in UNIX and UNIX derivative operating system computing environments.